Mentoring is an active relationship between a mentor (someone with greater experience and expertise) and a mentee for the purpose of personal and professional development. Less structured than management coaching, the mentoring relationship is a learning partnership of mutual respect in which the employee learns from the expertise and experience of the senior person. The mentor must be able to counsel, guide, and teach in a way that is helpful to the employee. Although the mentee is the identified learner in this relationship, both will learn when the mentoring is done well.
Mentors can provide immediate and tailored learning opportunities for the employee—especially helpful for new employees at all levels in an organization who are trying to figure out how they can contribute, relate effectively to their co-workers and supervisors, and gain the respect of others in their new role. Most new employees need a relationship with someone who can provide this guidance.
If you want to be an effective mentor, you must learn to listen —not hear, listen. By this I mean that we must put aside our tendency to judge others or persuade or advocate for a particular belief or position. Any of these tactics will simply result in a psychological barrier between you and the person you are trying to help; try to understand employees from their point of view.
In most instances, it is not a good idea to act as mentor to any of your direct reports. Your supervisory relationship with them does not usually create the conditions for a good mentoring relationship, and it may cause discord with others.
Once you understand a mentee’s problems or needs, try to share any useful information or related experiences you have had that might help the mentee learn from his/her own situations. Learning the ropes in the new company might have been hard for you, but you figured out how to do it. Perhaps you learned what works and what does not work when you needed to put together a core team for a new project; your mentee can learn from your experience. The situation will undoubtedly be different, but together you can decide how to apply the lessons to his/her experience.
Unlike most coaching, mentoring is more of an art than a science. A step-by-step structure does not usually fit: It is the quality of the relationship that determines effectiveness.